I work for a company that has grown quite a bit in terms of number of network devices and users. Having said that, it is still a small business with about 15 employees and 20 devices. The problem is lately some devices have been dropping off the network. The current network is setup using residential appliances. The Comcast cable modem is connected to a Netgear WNDR4000 wireless dual band router, which is then connected to a Netgear GS608 8 port switch. Four offices and the warehouse are fed to this single switch with 5 network cables being connected to the Netgear GS608 switch. The four offices and the warehouse all have more residential switches to provide network access to the users and devices. This is my question, can you recommend a specific low cost small business class device that will connect to the cable modem and will provide routing and firewall and maybe even wireless. Or at least a firewall router plus an additional wireless access point. All the small business options I have found seem to be rated as unstable. Oh, and I do want to keep everything at gigabit speeds. Thanks!

if you're into low cost and gigabyte, you're looking at pfsense on a small appliance (sold on their sites or many vendor's), or possibly on some hardware bought separately. (a "router" or "network appliance"

What we do is take their Business Class router / modem and coming off of it we have a firewall that triples as a VPN (For remote users), router, and naturally the firewall itself. Instead of using comcast for their DNS we use Open DNS (Free) so that we can filter web traffic so users are not going to certain sites.

This way we have one device that can function as three if needed.

That said, I would suggest a Firewall with routing capabilities. Some good ones are Juniper SSG's, Juniper SRX's and the Cisco ASA 5505.

if you're into low cost and gigabyte, you're looking at pfsense on a small appliance (sold on their sites or many vendor's), or possibly on some hardware bought separately. (a "router" or "network appliance" is nice, but a low-end computer with the required number of gigabyte network cards will be quite enough as well)

if you have a little more money, a small juniper or fortinet are less expensive than equivalent cisco boxes in terms of capabilities and come with a decent GUI rather than a uselessly complex command line. note that they are not any better than the above in terms of functionalities.

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